I stood in front of a dozen of my peers and team members for one of the most important meetings of my career and I froze. It wasn’t that I was nervous or didn’t know have a clear agenda. In fact, I had an extremely detailed and aggressive agenda as we were kicking off a massive, complex data center buildout and customer migration for 1000 enterprise customers and their 11 million consumers. I froze because of the the looks on everyone’s face which could only be described as resigned misery.

To make matters worse, they had every right to feel that way. We has just completed two miserable years migrating data centers negatively impacting our employees and customers. Now, because our division was sold, we were contractually obligated to “do it again” but this time with more scope and less time.

I froze because I knew none of my normal “new team” kick off strategies would work. A “we can do it” high energy approach would come off fake and inauthentic. A “think of all you’ll learn” approach was difficult given no one in the room ever wanted to be on another data center migration again. A “this will be super fun” was out of the question. So I stood there frozen in front of a white board as engineering, network ops and customer success leaders waited for me to kick-off this onsite. After a few painful moments of silence, I had a somewhat desperate, crazy idea.I asked everyone to close their eyes and to think of the best team, product or project they had ever worked on. I didn’t describe what “best” meant but asked them for that career highlight. A moment later, I asked folks to capture the characteristics of that “best team ever” with each attribute on its own post-it. After a few eye rolls and glares, folks started jotting down phrases. I asked someone to share an attribute specifically instructing that no details of the project, product or team was necessary. Someone shouted out “Trust”. I stuck the post-it on the whiteboard and added the other team members’ stickies to create a “Trust” cluster. “Shared Vision” was next followed by “No Limits”, “Can Do Attitude” and so on.

We ended with handful of characteristics in a fan shape and drew lines on the whiteboard pointing to center circle where we wrote “Awesome Outcome: Happy Customers & Happy Employees”. As we all looked at the words we put on the board, I shared that we could not control the scope of the project nor the timeline as they were both locked. We couldn’t compromise the quality of the program given the nature of migrating massive quantities of financial services data. However, as a team, we were 100% in control of how we showed up to each other, to the rest of the organization and to our customers. The beauty of this spontaneous, thirty minute exercise is that no one was telling the team how to behave. The behaviors were self-declared as critical to be the “best team ever” based on their own experiences. So what happened?

It was in fact a very long, hard year with tremendous personal sacrifice to execute the dozens of planned all night cutovers to minimize customer impact. In the end, we delivered an amazing customer experience as demonstrated by an unheard of +70 Net Promoter score. The team was recognized by senior leadership and the board for doing the impossible and we were proud.

In the post mortem, I asked team members what they were most proud of. Although I don’t remember formally talking about “how we’ll operate as a team” during that year, the team shared many of those very words in their retrospective. While the project was difficult, they were most proud to be a part of such an amazing team which accomplished greatness. ​

For me personally, that data center team was a career highlight and I credit some amount of the team's greatness to this short, spontaneous exercise.

While an organization's "customer focus" culture starts at the top, it's often the job of the Customer Success leader to operationalize that mindset. When faced with this challenge at Digital Insight, a digital banking SaaS company, we leveraged a few Design for Delight strategies from our time at Intuit that helped create organizational empathy and operationalize a customer focused mindset. ​

1) Customer Personas: In a B2B world, it's easy to lose sight that there are multiple personas within any organization that make up your "Customer". For example, when selling a digital banking platform, the decision maker "Robert" doesn't have the same priorities as "Chris" the implementation project manager. "Leanne" may be the one administering your product but it's "Liz" whose customer care team will use the product daily. To create customer empathy across our 600+ employee organization, we pulled together a cross-functional team of key influencers to interview customers, identify the top few personas and clarify what matters most to them. While the exercise felt like a luxury in our fast moving SaaS world, we leveraged these personas over and over again as sales, product managers and engineers moved beyond "the customer wants it" to "Leanne needs this to do her job". That focus informed decisions..

2) Customer Experience Mapping: The expression "never waste a crisis" is certainly relevant when in a customer success organization. After a particularly challenging go live with a large, important customer, that same cross-functional team of influencers mapped the current and desired customer experience. We kept it high level and spent our time writing the steps from the customer's point of view in the customer's language. It was harder than we thought given our default was to focus on what we as employees needed to do to sell, on-boarding, train and delight our customers. Once we grouped our critical steps into a few key phases, we focused on identifying the "moments of truth". These are the steps that are more emotionally loaded for the customer. For example, that first impression of a kick off meeting or how go live preparedness is handled can delight or infuriate your customer. We prioritized our time based on these moments so we were spending time in area's with the greatest impact to the customer's perception. We tried to identify ahead of time the potential emotions at play (e.g. "this project was dumped in my lap") and getting ahead of that (e.g. "we're in the boat with you, partners to get this done right"). It was a subtle but critical shift and our Net Promoter scores began to climb almost immediately.

3) Simple, clear statement of success: In 2015, I was asked to lead a massive, complex data center migration. A cross-functional team of engineers, operations and customer success managers was responsible for the customer experience experience for our 1000 B2B financial institution customers and their 11M consumers. During the kick off meeting, we set out to define our measures of success. Like so many teams, we all agreed that we needed to be "customer-focused"? But what did that mean? We spent hours debating words, emotions and statements to refine what our customers expected from us. In the end, we anchored on five distinct words that would define what "customer-focus" meant to us. We would be accurate, proactive, supportive, transparent and personalized. These five words became the lens by which we managed every aspect of the project. For example, engineers needed to accurately identify the exact impact well in advance of a service migration so we could proactively communicate in apersonalized way to each of the 1000 customers. It was a tall order and at times seemed impossible. However, when those customers gave our team an unheard of, world class +70 Net Promoter score for a data center migration they didn't ask for, their verbatim feedback reflected those five words over and over again.

It's so easy to say "be customer focused" but operationalizing it across large and rapidly growing teams is a challenge. What do you think? What have you found helpful? I'd love to hear your insights and advice so take a moment and add a Comment. ​